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Thoughts from a Changing Mind

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So, I don’t mean to flog a dead horse by singling out I Kissed Dating Goodbye (IKDG), but I almost inevitably will. The wildly popular Christian anti-dating guide has come under a great deal of scrutiny in the last few years, as those who entered adulthood at the height of its popularity have started to assess its impact and legacy. Its author, Josh Harris, has apologised for the damage IKDG caused to a lot of young people, and is currently undergoing a process of listening to criticism and examining the ways the book caused harm to its audience. Its failings have been widely brought to light and discussed. However, I’m writing about it here because, thanks largely to IKDG, the themes and theories of the what has been called the “courtship” movement (or the “purity” movement), had an impact on lives far beyond its birthplace, the US conservative Christian subculture, even making their way across the pond and into some relatively mainstream UK churches. It’s hard to separate the book from the movement it played a massive role in promoting. Besides which, the story about Anna’s nightmare from IKDG, which I relate below, serves as a vivid encapsulation of the thinking behind the courtship/emotional virginity movements.

So from here on in, there is going to be at least some small amount of horse-flogging. I can’t help that. Because between blows, I wanted to reflect on my own experiences, from my own perspective, having grown into adulthood listening to the rhetoric of the purity movement. And I wanted to write about three concepts promoted by IKDG and the broader courtship movement, (even if the terms they use differ from what I’ve used here): emotional virginity, courtship, and the heart as a finite resource that can be given away.

Emotional Virginity

It was a warm summer’s day and all the girls of the youth group were sitting on the front steps of the church, listening to two women, the youth group leaders. We were receiving a lesson about sex, sexuality, and dating. The boys were somewhere inside, listening to a similar talk from the male youth leaders, except their lesson was tailored towards boys.

I don’t remember much of what was said except from one little story that must have made an impression on me. The youth leader talked about how careful we should be about dating. She told the following tale: Read More

I’m having a sick day today, and I just thought I would write a quick note about why I do this. Why do I write so much about a religion I left several years ago and so little about other things?

Well, the first thing to note is that this blog isn’t the only thing I write. I try to retain a measure of anonymity here so that this can be the platform where I can write whatever I want to put out there.

But why do I choose to put my thoughts on Christianity “out there”? If you leave you leave, right?

Well, sure. I left a religion and I no longer have any faith in a God or any belief in the supernatural. My mind has totally and utterly changed. But that, in itself, is something that left me with a lot of questions. Why did I believe this was real? Why did other people assure me that this was true, and why did I believe them? How could I have experienced the “presence” of someone who doesn’t exist – how could I have thought I loved this being? In retrospect, it should have been obvious that this wasn’t real – how did I miss those signs? How and why did I explain away the indications that not everything was as it seemed? How do I make sure I don’t fall for nonsense again and how do I help others avoid it? When a Mormon or JW knocks on the door how do I explain my stance to them?

Added to these questions, there is often a strong emotional component to leaving one’s faith. You lose an awful lot: the foundations of your worldview. A community that you were part of. A certain identity. Your assuredness that there’s a benevolent force at the heart of everything and that one day, things will come up right and there will be a final justice. Looking back, I can see that losing my faith was something akin to a bereavement. I experienced grief and heartache – made all the more difficult because no one else knew that I had been bereaved. No one else knew that anything had died; I’d merely changed my beliefs and stopped attending a church on Sunday, which doesn’t sound quite as drastic and devastating as “She’s lost everything she believed in and a community she was deeply invested in”, but the latter description is how I experienced it. I had no one to talk to about it because no one was going through the same thing as me and no one could quite understand; if they were Christians they would try to re-convert; if they weren’t, they didn’t have the faintest clue what I was going through.

So I write because this is something that really mattered to me, and I’ve pretty much kept my thoughts on it entirely to myself for a long time, and I want to express them. It’s that simple.

(Two useful organisations for people who have lost their faith: The Clergy Project helps members of the clergy who no longer believe but may need to stay closeted so they don’t lose their jobs. And the Freedom from Religion Foundation helps people with the transition out of religion.)

So I came across this video of Justin Bieber and his pastor friends at a recent Hillsong conference. Hillsong, for those who don’t know, is a very trendy chain of churches, with a worship band that makes incredibly popular praise music. One of the men featured in the video is Carl Lentz, quite simply the hippest of the current crop of hip pastors, whose Hillsong campus has famously been visited by celebrities like Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Chris Pratt.

Now obviously the video is mocking them, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. However, I’ve shared it here because of the phrase Chad Veach, a pastor (and amateur drummer?), says again and again in various ways starting at 1:17:Read More

We have reached the anniversary of an important landmark on the road to equality for LGBTQ people. It has been fifty years this week since the Sexual Offences Act was passed, which partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. Despite great leaps forward for LGBTQ people, the last five decades have sadly not been an unimpeded march of progress: Only this week, Trump announced via Twitter that trans folk are no longer welcome in the US military. Meanwhile, Russia is denying the torture and murder of LGBTQ people in Chechnya. Despite all the progress made in some nations, the big and small injustices and indignities endured by one of the world’s most misunderstood and beleaguered minorities, continue apace.

So in light of all this, I’ve been thinking about how my own views on homosexuality have changed over the years, and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it for a while now. I’ve been remembering back to the homophobic attitudes I not only encountered when I was a Christian, but even held myself. People of all religious persuasions and none can be homophobic, of course, but most of my firsthand experience of homophobic remarks, attitudes, and actions occurred when I was a Christian. Read More

A couple of months ago, my mum told me that a colleague had confided a shocking secret to her: a man they both knew, who was well-known and respected in our community, had sexually abused this colleague decades ago when she was a child. Although shocked, my mother had believed this woman’s account straight away, and had never doubted it.

I didn’t say so, but my horror at hearing that this man was a child abuser (thankfully now tried and found guilty) was mixed with my pride in my mum for believing the victim. I wasn’t proud of her just because she believed the woman, but also because of the reason she gave for believing: “She came across as a very bitter person.” It might sound odd to say that I’m proud of her for that, but it’s because too often, someone’s bitterness is used as a reason to dismiss them out of hand. An example that springs to mind is that of televangelist Lori Bakker insisting earlier this year that most of the women who participated in the Women’s March on Washington had been abused as children: Read More

My fiancé and I had a visit this weekend from my aunt. She stayed for three days, during which we took in a few of London’s finest museums. I rate the Imperial War Museum very highly, but the Natural History Museum has got to be my favourite. We managed to spend a couple of hours there, at the dinosaur exhibition and the human evolution exhibition. For reasons I can neither comprehend nor defend I hadn’t ever seen the human evolution exhibition before. It was wonderful. Human evolution blows my mind. I’m amazed by the thought of having a connection to something as familiar, yet alien, as another hominid species; I’m enthralled by the sense of looking something so physically and cognitively foreign, yet seeing so much of myself looking back at me. That feeling is the reason why, when people get to know about cephalopods, they become fascinated by them,and I think it’s also why I love having pets and love learning about animals. As thick with irony as this may be, that feeling is what I always imagine Adam experiencing when he saw Eve for the first time, and declared her to be “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”.

Then there’s the great questions of us being here while the other hominid species aren’t. How did we survive and thrive so well while they died out? Should we be proud or ashamed? When and how will we go the same way?

Three days ago, the centre of my wonderful home city, London, became the scene of a terrorist attack in which four innocent people were murdered and many more were injured. The aim of the attacker was to incite terror, so it was immensely satisfying to visit the city centre the very next day and see for myself precisely how hard he’d failed. London is a huge and resilient city and, as always, the centre was jam-packed with shoppers and commuters, tourists and photographers, buskers and dancing Hare Krishnas. Walking the pavements from Regents Street down to Embankment, I didn’t for so much as a moment remember to feel afraid – that is, until I approached Trafalgar Square. A sliver of anxiety ran through me as I saw that dozens of police vans and personnel in high-viz vests had formed a formidable ring around the iconic plaza, where people had come together to remember the victims. The police kept a protective watch as the crowd observed silence, lit candles, and gave strength to one another.

I’m a fan of watching formal debate. One of my favourites is William Lane Craig and Shelly Kagan debating and discussing the question “Is God Necessary for Morality?”. I was struck by how poorly Craig argued his case in comparison to his usual performances, but then the loosey-goosey format didn’t seem to play to his strengths. I’d never heard of Shelly Kagan before but after hearing his passionate defence of animal welfare I’ve decided that I probably love him. Anyway, the discussion made me think about some things: Meaning and morality, the priorities we hold, and the different ways I thought about them both pre- and post-deconversion.

At the outset, I have to admit that I might have found Craig’s argument to be difficult to fully comprehend. Craig stressed that his argument wasn’t “life, if it is finite, is meaningless” but rather “life, however long it is, is meaningless if God doesn’t exist”. But he also kept on talking about how our existences are rendered meaningless by the eventual end of everything, and at the same time, he didn’t appear to make a very robust argument that only the existence of God can bring meaning to human actions. That being the case, I have dealt with his argument in much the same way I might have if he had based it in the idea that “human life is only meaningful if it is infinite” rather than “human life is only meaningful if God exists”. So if what I write appears to be a strawman, it’s unintentional. Listen to the debate yourself before deciding if my characterisation of Craig’s argument is fair. I certainly did intend it to be.

It’s a bit of a paradox: people don’t really change, yet we are capable of huge, life-altering changes in our beliefs. I’ve previously written about the change in my beliefs and moral perspective on abortion. The biggest area of change, though, has been in my beliefs about the supernatural.